Writings, opinion and maybe a few rants

November 06, 2012

Romney brings the ides of business

The Providence Journal: November 6, 2012

By Chip Benson

NEEDHAM

Mitt Romney isn't so much about ideas per se, he's about the efficiency of ideas. He's not a political animal, but he is a pragmatic animal. He gets criticized for changing his position on policies, and post-debate is widely viewed to have agreed with President Obama on too much, but that's because he's interested in process and efficacy, not ideology.

Sure, Romney has a Web site full of ideas, and a five-point plan, but if he could speak freely (as in the surreptitiously recorded "47 percent'' speech!), he might say that at this point in America's history it's not the policies of government but the management of them that is most important. That it's not the quantity of government, but the quality of it.

Conservatives are agog over the inefficiencies, waste and incompetence in government - too much so - but this is where Mitt connected with them, as an efficiency expert, a businessman. For Romney is not of the Tea Party, Neo-Con and Ronald Reagan world. On policy, he is a traditional old-school Republican from the 1950s, which is to say he is pre-partisan! He even dresses the part.

Romney personifies the ideology of business, and is very much of the economic moment right now, but he probably has not connected enough of the dots necessary to become president. He has, however, ushered in the Ides of Business unto the presidential political spectrum. We are in the age of business, of economics, pragmatism, of digital automation. So the next election will surely bring a Michael Bloomberg or a Bill Gates type to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, to lead the United States of Economics. E pluribus debitum: From many, much debt.

Obama may be transcendent, but time is running out on the government of the United States. Too many competing ideas (lawyers!) and not enough bottom-line accounting (businessmen) have left the U.S. stretched thin at home and around the world, and on the precipice of insolvency. It's not really a matter of ideas anymore but of the effectiveness and efficiency of those ideas.

Many areas of government do a terrific job of delivering services at a very low cost, but ideological partisanship over the past 30 years have created a dire situation in which Democrats and Republicans don't want to admit to compromise with the other side. We are a competitive society after all! So taxes aren't raised, programs aren't cut, and economists increasingly call the national deficit as an existential issue.

Yet political ideology is almost dead. The days of trickle-down government and trickle-down economics are numbered. A freight train filled with cans previously kicked down the road is headed toward a fiscal cliff.

The Ides of Business are upon us, and soon a turnaround specialist, such as Mitt Romney, will take the country through a managed bankruptcy. It will be called something else, though! The reaper will be grim, possibly Chinese, and very painful. There will be tumult. We will try to kill our way out of it, but a different era will begin in America. Ideas will not matter. Executing efficient systems will.